junie

“In the cracks of the prison, something blossomed. A field of wildflowers imposed on the night sky. Blood was coming. Joy and dread mingled there, infusing the air with a powerful sense of rapture and uncertainty.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“An aesthetics of the earth?... Yes. But an aesthetics of disruption and intrusion. Finding the fever of passion for the ideas of 'environment' (which I call surroundings) and 'ecology', both apparently such futile notions in these landscapes of desolation. Imagining the idea of love for the earth - so ridiculously inadequate or else frequently the basis for such sectarian intolerance - with all the strength of charcoal fires or sweet syrup.

Aesthetics of rupture and connection.

Because that is the crux of it, and almost everything is said in pointing out that under no circumstances could it ever be a question of transforming land into territory again. Territory is the basis of conquest. Territory requires filiation be planted and legitimated. Territory is defined by its limits, and they must be expanded. A land henceforth has no limits. That is the reason it is worth defending against every form of alienation.

Aesthetics of a variable continuum, of an invariant discontinuum.”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

“A theory of riot is a theory of crisis. This is true at a vernacular and local level, in moments of shattered glass and fire, wherein riot is taken to be the irruption of a desperate situation, immiseration at its limit, the crisis of a given community or city, of a few hours or days. However, riot can only be grasped as having an internal and structural significance, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon, insofar as we can discover the historical motion that provides its form and substance. We must then move to further levels, where the gathering instances of riot are inextricable from ongoing and systemic capitalist crisis. Moreover, the riot as a particular form of struggle illuminates the character of crisis, makes it newly thinkable, and provides a prospect from which to view its unfolding.

The first relation between riot and crisis is that of surplus. This seems already a paradox, as both crisis and riot are commonly understood to arise from dearth, shortfall, deprivation. At the same time, riot is itself the experience of surplus. Surplus danger, surplus information, surplus military gear. Surplus emotion. Indeed, riots were once known as “emotions,” a history still visible in the French word: émeute. The crucial surplus in the moment of riot is simply that of participants, of population. The moment when the partisans of riot exceed the police capacity for management, when the cops make their first retreat, is the moment when the riot becomes fully itself, slides loose from the grim continuity of daily life. The ceaseless social regulation that had seemed ideological and ambient and abstract is in this moment of surplus disclosed as a practical matter, open to social contest.

All these surpluses correspond to larger social transformations from which these experiences of affective and practical surplus are inextricable. These transformations are the material restructurings that respond to and constitute capitalist crisis, and which feature surpluses of both capital and population as core features. And it is these that propose riot as a necessary form of struggle.”
― Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

“Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. There would be something great and noble about initiating such a movement referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities. Thought of self and thought of other here become obsolete in their duality…. What is here is open, as much as this there. I would be incapable of projecting from one to the other. This-here is the weave and it weaves no boundaries.”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation